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Traveling through Ecuador by bus is certainly not as nice or as easy as traveling through Colombia. Granted, it is definitely cheaper, but the buses usually suck… there are no bathrooms on the bus (even long distance ones), no A/C (open your window to cool you off, even though it’s going to piss off the people behind you!), and they are really old, rickety, and often smell bad. What’s more is that it seems like you have to change buses a hundred times just to get from one city to another. As I said before, it took 5 buses to get from the mountains in the middle of the country to the coastline. Well, our trip from Canoa to Puerto Lopez was ONLY coastline, but it still took several forms of transportation: 1 bus to San Vincente, 1 ferry to Bahia, 1 eco taxi (a bike rickshaw) from the port to the bus terminal, 1 bus to Jipijapa, and the final bus to Puerto Lopez. Jeez!! That would’ve been one easy and comfortable bus ride in Colombia, for sure.
Needless to say, we arrived in the evening and were immediately hassled by more eco-taxi guys who wanted to take us
to the hostel of their choice, not ours. They have deals set up with certain hostels and must make a commission because they insist on escorting you there, even if you don’t want a ride in their eco-taxi. We did end up following the advice of one of them and checked into Hotel Spondylus, which was a modern and relatively cheap hotel on the north end of the beach. We had our own room and bathroom and were the only ones staying there so it was nice and quiet.
That night we ate dinner at a great Italian restaurant called Bellaitalia or something like that. Then we went to enjoy a few beers at one of the many beachside bars. We chilled in hammocks on the sand and drank some local brews until we got tired. On our way back to the hostel we came across a dog that needed some love. She was tied up to a sign post along the sidewalk. She looked submissive and wagged her tail as we came near, so I stopped to pet her. She looked like she was starving to death so I went and bought some Ritz crackers at a little
market. The dog downed several crackers before it started to gag and choke. I thought maybe she was thirsty so I went to one of the beach bars and got a cup of water but she wouldn’t drink it. That’s when I felt the wire around her neck. Someone had tied a wire around her neck that was so tight that I couldn’t even slide my pinky finger under it. She couldn’t swallow or hardly breathe. So, I frantically untied the rope from the wire and then unfastened the wire from around her neck and let her free. I hope she’s still alive and running free on the beach somewhere, eating scraps of seafood the fishermen leave behind.
The next day in Puerto Lopez we went on a whale watching tour and to Isla de Plata. Humpback whales travel up from Antarctica to give birth in the warmer waters off the coast of Ecuador every July-August. They can’t give birth in Antarctica because the babies aren’t born with enough blubber to survive such cold waters. We got to see at least a dozen humpback whales from a pretty good distance, but they emerge from the water so quickly that
it’s almost impossible to get good photos. We mostly saw a lot of fins, tails, backs, and blowholes. We only saw a couple of them jump all the way out of the water, but they were very far away.
At Isla de Plata, we took a tour of the island, which is known for it marine birds. People call it the “poor man’s Galapagos”, but I think you can see a lot more marine life in the Galapagos than here. It was really cool though. We got to see tons of blue-footed boobies, frigates, red-footed boobies, another kind of booby, and some other marine birds. The boobies were the coolest and they were everywhere. The frigates were in mating season so the males were puffing out their huge red chests and thumping them to make a drumming sound that attracts the females. Afterward we got to go snorkeling. Ryan saw a small sea turtle and I got stung by lots of teeny tiny jellyfish. That night we went back to the Italian restaurant and had the best tiramisu ever.
The next day we took a local bus 20 minutes to Parque Nacional Machalilla. This is a tropical dry forest
along the beach. We hiked around and saw some beautiful beach landscapes. Ryan went swimming in the cold waters at Los Frailes beach. That was about the extent of our 2nd day there. Relaxing, pretty, and uneventful. That night we had dinner at a beachside restaurant along Malecon, a couple beers on the beach, and then went to bed pretty early because we had to catch a 7 a.m. bus to Guayaquil so we could try to get down across the Peruvian border that night.
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